Katie Randall's blog

 Back in October I posted a paper on this site exploring the relation between the medicalization of disability (as seen in Eli Claire's Exile & Pride) and the pathologization of transsexuality (as seen in Rachel Ann Heath’s The Praeger Handbook of Transsexuality: Changing Gender to Match Mindset.

(read the full paper here: /exchange/node/11075 )

In The Praeger Handbook of Transsexuality: Changing Gender to Match Mindset a lot of Heath's discussion of the medicalization of disability revolved around the standards of care (SOC), standards written by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health to guide doctors with transsexual patients. The Praeger Handbook was published in 2006 and critiqued the 6th edition of the SOC, published in 2001. It was this critique that I incorporated into my own work.

But right around the same time that I posted my thoughts, something happened that I didn’t know about until later. A new and revised SOC was published.

Communal Clarity

Making Sense of Media

About Communal Clarity:

     We are bombarded with hundreds of media images each day. This overload of information is something universally experienced in industrialized countries, and it can be paralyzing. How many of us are taught to evaluate these messages? And once we make our evaluations, what then?

     According to the Center for Media Literacy, media literacy is “the ability to communicate competently in all media forms as well as to access, understand, analyze, evaluate and participate with powerful images, words and sounds that make up our contemporary mass media culture” (read more at http://www.medialit.org/about-cml). Different organizations are working hard to promote media literacy education in schools, and the mission to teach as many individuals as possible these tools of analysis is a vital one.

     But this website is founded on the premise that media literacy is not an individual matter. Individuals can and should learn to analyze media messages for themselves, but this is not an end in itself. Because media messages are received in a different way by everyone, they can't be fully understood alone. While media literacy may be a skill set, media analysis is always a conversation.

     I want to create an online space for these conversations, and Communal Clarity is the result.

After our unit on De/Meaning Sex and Gender, I knew I wanted to focus my web event on intersexuality. It’s a form of biological diversity of sex which most people don’t hear about until college, and many not even then.

So I started thinking—when would it make sense for students to first be introduced to intersexuality in an academic setting? I thought back to my own education in biology and the answer, to me, was middle school. In my middle school we had a unit in biology class which was basically “puberty education,” although I don’t remember what its official title was. We learned about the physical changes that male and female bodies go through in puberty—in other words, the changes our own bodies were going through right then. This would have been the perfect time to mention that not everyone would exactly fit into one pattern or another—that chromosomal sex, primary sex characteristics, and secondary sex characteristics don’t always match up. But this was never covered—not in middle school, high school or beyond.

I know that not everyone is given information about sex characteristics or the reproductive system in middle school, or even later. But to me the timing felt right.

I included the permission slip because I think that for many schools this would be part of the process of giving such a lecture.

Sample permission slip:

Medical Authority in the Discourses of Disability and Transsexuality

Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation is an impossibly far-ranging book. Its author Eli Clare covers many topics that are entangled within his own life: tensions of class, sexuality, gender, abuse, disability, environmentalism and exile. Here I want to use his discussion of the medicalization of disability as a springboard to approach Rachel Ann Heath’s description of the pathologization of transsexuality in The Praeger Handbook of Transsexuality: Changing Gender to Match Mindset. Medicalization and pathologization are not precisely equivalent terms, but to me both represent a process of delegitimizing their subjects and placing this lost authority into the hands of medical professionals. Both produce negative or limiting effects that are not widely acknowledged. In addition, both are oriented towards “curing” or “normalizing” difference.

Exile and Pride: disability history